Competition Day Preparation Strategies to Enhance Performance in Swimmers

Synopsis

In the lead up to a major event, much time is spent preparing athletes for competition. On competition day however an additional window exists where performance can be acutely enhanced utilising various preconditioning strategies, the most common being the pre-competition warm-up. Both passive and active warm-ups can elicit improvements in swimming performance, though competitive swimmers typically experience a between the pool warm-up and race start (transition phase). Transition phases of 30-45 min are not uncommon and muscle temperature is known to decline immediately following exercise, with appreciable reductions occurring after 15-20 min. Additional warm-up strategies may therefore be required to optimise subsequent performance. Recent research has also demonstrated that completion of an exercise bout several hours prior to a competitive event may provide a priming effect to improve competitive performance later that same day. We aimed to investigate how altering the content of these two preconditioning strategies would affect subsequent sprint swimming performance.